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Hi folks, I'm not sure if this has been said before since I've not even been here 5 minutes yet.

Over the weekend I was doing some decorating, and had to install a new doorbell. Very boring, I know, but I noticed the bell is made by a company called Friedland, and so Friedland make chimes (obviously). What do you guys reckon, is it a weird coincidence? Or is this where Jasper found inspiration for Chymes' name?

OK, I'm a bit behind the times, and this is a five-year-old thread, but I'm new to the NCD.

Friedland Chymes is indeed named after the doorbell (according to Fforde himself) , but I was wondering if it went further than that.

There's the Chief Superintendent Bell in Morse's Oxford, but he's a rather bland character. I think it's more likely to be inspired by Carroll's Bellman from The Hunting of the Snark. His rule-of-three ('If I tell it three times it's true') sounds rather like Chymes' approach to truth.

Merci!
(Which incidentally works well both in the French-speaking and the German-speaking parts of the country!)

I have only just discovered Jasper Fforde as an author, and I'm trying not to expose myself to too many spoilers until I have read the relevant works. (I love finding authors with long lists of already published works, as I hate waiting for new books to come out. I used to read exclusively dead authors, but I have decided to make an exception. I will not have Mr Fforde killed.)

Is there any curated repository for allusions, references and other cross-contaminations of JFf's books?

I'm looking for something like the Annotated Pratchett File (but that's not really maintained any more.) Or maybe more like the wiki that's in process of replacing it.

While I have a fairly good grasp of English litterature as well as general culture, I have never actually lived in an English-speaking country, and I'm sure that there are loads of allusions that pass me by. (Especially in the area of nursery rhymes. My wife is English and speaks English to our kids, and if it wasn't for that I would never have understood who Thomas Thomm (son of a flutist...) was...)

Mrs. SkidMarks & I lived in Walchwil in Kanton Zug for a while (and before that I commuted to Geneva from the U.K. for a couple of years) so I remember "Merci vilmal" and similar expressions.

Unfortunately as almost everyone spoke English, and we could not find anywhere which taught Swiss-German, we came away with only a few expressions. We also developed a love of schinkengipfeli & Zuger Kirschtorte, although not together.

Back to the subject: others may know of a repository, but I haven't come across one.

You may find a knowledge of aircraft and the film industry useful.

Of course the Nursery Crime books use characters from Mother Goose and Punch & Judy puppet shows, if that is of help.

We live in the outskirts of Geneva, and it is indeed possible (even easy) to survive for an extended period of time on English alone. But the kids are in local schools, and I work in a local company, so we manage to pick up some of the local lingo. (My native language is Swedish, but I have a reasonable grasp of English.)

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I do 'get' quite a few references, but the problem is that it's impossible to know what you haven't seen.

Reading Pratchetts works it used to be quite a sport to try to figure out what obscure Victorian author he quoted, before checking the cheat-sheet APF. Admittedly I'm a newcomer to the JFf universe(s), but it looks like his books deserve the same treatment.

There once was a time...no, really...when Fforumites did this sort of thing.

Look at [www.jasperfforde.com], there are some entries listed under "Guides to The Nextian Universe", that are the result of more or less collective work here on the fforum. (You know how this goes: one person (PSD, I think it was) does all the work, and everyone knows better.)

Each of these guides to the first four nextian books have an accompanying thread somewhere here...you'll have to dig deep to find them.

Another user (MartinB, longtime lost now) anounced he would compile something alike for The Big Over Easy. That was maybe six years ago. He never had anything to show, and since then noone has tried to do a guide that I know of.

For english nursery rhymes, I found [www.rhymes.org.uk] to be pretty helpfull; [www.nonsenselit.org] is a exhaustive resource on the poems of Edward Lear, and on Project Gutenberg you can find Mary Steel's classical collection of english fairy tales.

The best tip for the newer books I think is to do the sleuthing competitions that ran at the time of their publication. If you solve them (or at least read the solutions), you will be prodded onto a number of the more striking ideas hidden in the books.